The Motorola Grasp is a good messaging phone on U.S. Cellular, but don't plan to use it for much more than that.

The Motorola Grasp is a decent little feature phone on U.S. Cellular. It's tiny, it's cute, and it's free after a $50 mail-in rebate. It's a good choice if you like to text, though its basic multimedia features leave a bit to be desired.

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Design, Call Quality, and Apps
One of my coworkers spotted the Grasp near my computer and said, "Oh look, it's a cute little baby BlackBerry." While the Grasp is most certainly not a BlackBerry, you can't deny the resemblance. It has a nice full QWERTY keyboard as well as an optical trackpad directly below the display, which really opens the door to BlackBerry comparisons. At 3.7 by 2.4 by .53 inches, the phone is short and a little squat. It feels relatively solid, if a bit downmarket. Motorola has chosen an oddly asymmetric design, in which the face of the phone is offset slightly to the right. I repeatedly found myself wishing the face would just somehow center itself. The 2.2-inch display has a disappointingly low 220-by-176 resolution. It's sharp enough for messaging, but images and video looked washed out and grainy.

The Grasp is a tri-band EV-DO Rev 0 (850/1700/1900 MHz) 3G device with no Wi-Fi. Voice quality was OK, but not great. Voices sounded a bit fuzzy in the earpiece, but loud enough and completely understandable. Calls made with the Grasp actually sounded quite good, and callers said I sounded very clear. Calls also sounded clear through an Aliph Jawbone Icon ($99, 4 stars) Bluetooth headset. Voice dialing worked fine over Bluetooth without training. The speakerphone sounded fine and went just loud enough for outdoor use. Battery life was average at 7 hours and 3 minutes of talk time.

The trackpad took a few minutes to grow accustomed to, but felt rather intuitive once I did. There is a button directly to the left of the trackpad that triggers the phone's messaging menu, and this is where the Grasp truly shines. The tiny QWERTY keyboard has easy-to-press rubberized keys, which makes typing quite simple. Sending text messages was a breeze. The phone also supports threaded messaging, so texts are grouped together and displayed as a conversation.

The Grasp's UI is uncomplicated, spare, and easy to navigate. The main screen contains links to U.S. Cellular's app store, messaging, contacts, Bluetooth, multimedia, and a datebook. You can also access the "main menu" by clicking the select button on the top left of the phone, but the main menu is mostly just a random collection of links you can find elsewhere.

This is the first phone we've seen with Google SMS integrated into the UI. Anyone, on any phone, can search Google by sending a text message to 46645; this phone puts that feature front and center with a series of menus to guide you through the experience. To find a movie time, for instance, I was prompted to type in the name of the movie I wanted to see and the city or zip code in which I wanted to see it and I was almost instantly texted back with a plethora of nearby options. This is a great feature to have, and makes this feature phone feel just a little bit smarter.

There is no built-in Web browser or email support. I downloaded a free browser and email client through Easyedge, and they worked just fine. The Novarra browser can handle WAP pages, but not full Web sites. As with text messaging, the Grasp handles email well, too. The email application supports AOL, Yahoo!, Gmail, Hotmail and POP/IMAP, and I was signed into my Gmail account in less than a minute of downloading the application.

Multimedia, Camera, and Conclusions
The Grasp only comes with 68MB of internal memory, but it supports MicroSD memory cards. My 16 and 32GB SanDisk cards worked fine. The phone plays AAC, MP3 and WMA audio files. Music wasn't sorted in any particular fashion, and album art didn't display on screen, though there was a placeholder box where it looked like it should have been. Sound quality was hollow and tinny through the phone's speaker, but music sounded decent (if still a bit tinny) on the included headset. The phone supports 3.5mm wired headphones, which is convenient for avid music listeners. Quality over Altec Lansing BackBeat ($99.99-$129.99, 3.5 stars) Bluetooth headphones sounded quite gooddeep, rich, and full of bass.

There is also support for video playback, but it is rather lackluster. 3GP files played, but the screen is so tiny that I suspect users will find the grainy, slightly washed out video quality just isn't worth it. MPEG4 videos were slow and choppy, and the audio didn't sync with the video.

The Grasp has a 1.3-megapixel camera on the back. All the photos I took had a grainy quality, which was especially pronounced in lower light. Colors looked washed out across the board. The phone can also record videos, though they suffer from the same grainy, cloudy image issues as the photos.

We haven't reviewed many U.S. Cellular feature phones. But the Motorola Grasp looks like a good choice if you're looking for a tiny, capable messaging device on U.S. Cellular. The Samsung Messager Touch, which we liked when we reviewed the version for Cricket, is another solid option, especially if you're looking for a phone with a larger keyboard.

About the Author

Alex Colon is the managing editor of PCMag's consumer electronics team. He holds a Bachelor's Degree in English Writing and Literature from Pace University and got his start editing books before deciding technology would probably be a lot more fun.
Though he does the majority of his reading and writing on various digital displays, Alex still l... See Full Bio

Motorola Grasp (U.S. Cellular)

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